


corrina, corrina

by curlymcclain



Series: corrina, corrina [1]
Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Boris follows Theo to NYC, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Lots of healing, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, lots of yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-08 20:49:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20841806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curlymcclain/pseuds/curlymcclain
Summary: Seeing him here, in New York, surrounded by the deep browns and golds of Hobart and Blackwell, is so alien to me I have to repress the urge to pinch myself like a child would after a dream. It looks incorrect, him standing here. Like someone has taken a pair of scissors to my memories of him, cut him out of his rightful place on the abandoned playground, and pasted him sloppily into a corner of my life where he doesn’t belong. Has it only been a few weeks? It feels like ages longer, like it’s been a decade, like we’re different people trying to see what exactly we liked about each other so much way back when.But then he says it again- “Potter.”- and that feeling vanishes as quickly as it arrived.“You came,” I say dumbly.He gives a cheery smirk that I don’t believe. “Promised I would.”





	corrina, corrina

**Author's Note:**

> thank you donna tartt for beating the shit out of me every day

I started eating again about two weeks after I crash-landed at Hobie’s. When I’d first arrived, I was too fevered to even sit all the way up- but after I was back on my feet, starving as I was, I found that everything made me feel sick. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize how much my stomach must have shrunk in Las Vegas, living off stolen candy and leftover casino appetizers. 

Slowly, my appetite came back, much to Hobie’s relief. He did his best to conceal how disturbed he was by the state I was in- emaciated, hair overgrown, teeth falling out like Oliver Twist- but I could see him silently cursing out the system for failing me the way it did.

I honestly didn’t care. The system, as far as I had experienced, was set up to fail everyone, an endless cycle of tragedy and boredom that can only be escaped by waiting for your eighteenth birthday. That had been my plan, anyway, from the day my dad showed up, and everyone who promised that they cared about me decided that he- known alcoholic, criminal fuckup- would be better suited to my care than the Barbours, because fuck you, that’s why. 

It became clear to me then just how little blood relation meant, and looking back on it now I almost feel bad that I thought all of this so bitterly at the time, and continued to believe it after my father’s death. 

But it was true: as soon as I got to Las Vegas, I had decided to hunker down and wait it out.

Five years, I knew, wasn’t objectively a long time, but in my grief-stricken and hopeless state it seemed like a lifetime of sitting around in an empty doll’s house. 

Of course, I hadn’t foreseen Boris. How could I have? How could any one person create him, so extraordinary in his penchant for extremes? How could he be a real person, and not a character in a surreal, swirly dream I concocted while smothered under the influence of Mrs. Barbour’s pills? 

Sometimes, when we first were getting to know each other, I would squint at him while he slept, as if waiting for the facade to crack. But it became clear to me, despite his sensationalism, that he was utterly, desperately real; and he possessed a soul far more human than my own. 

And I miss him. I thought I knew what that felt like during the months he traipsed around with Kotku, but I was wrong. _ This _ is what it feels like to miss him. 

It isn’t like losing my mother- there’s no hollow, screaming cavern where my chest should be. 

It’s like losing something you don’t know how to get through your day without. If you lose your wallet, you have to modify everything you do until you get it back: you have to work out how to get around without money, how to manage if you get carded somewhere, try and remember your credit card number and get by without a spare key. Some of these things you can plan- cancel your cards, retrace your steps- and some of them you can’t. Sometimes, you get stuck somewhere, and you never thought you’d end up stuck there, because you’re used to having what you need. You didn’t think someone even _ could _ get stuck where you’re stuck. And you have to figure it out without any help.

Losing Boris feels like some monumental version of that. I had become so accustomed to him at my side that I didn’t realize how much I needed him there. Without him, I feel lost, listless, incomplete. I wonder constantly if he feels the same way. If he comes face to face with something and realizes he doesn’t know how to get through it without me. 

Some selfish and frightened part of me hopes he does. I don’t like the idea of being just another person he has to leave behind (not to mention that it would mean whatever muddied up feelings I have towards him, however confusing, are mutual).

I want badly to tell Hobie how I feel, the reason I’m so distant. I worry he blames himself, like he’s not doing enough for me, when in fact my dissatisfaction has nothing to do with him. He’s been a model guardian; I wonder how he’s finding time to work in the shop and pull in money, since all he’s done since Pippa left is tinker with a few changelings and dote after me. My guess is that he isn’t.

He knows about Boris, sort of. He’d asked me if I was alone out there, so sadly that I felt unable to lie. I said yes, I had a best friend. Ukrainian émigré, absent parent, stayed at mine most nights. He was interested, and I wish I could have told him more, but the subject of Boris was a wound that hadn’t healed.

I obviously told him nothing about anything else. Nothing about the way I would catch Boris looking at me while we swam, eyes peeking over the waterline and darting away, back under the water as soon as they met mine. Nothing about our sleeping arrangement, and how I would wake up first and decide I’d rather skip school than bother untangling our legs from one another. Nothing, nothing, nothing about the nights that we never even talked about with each other. Or the mornings when I’d watch him throw water in his face and almost gag at the sight of small, soft bruises on his neck.

And nothing about the last night, outside my house, his hands cupped around my cheeks and his lips pressed desperately to mine. It had been over so fast, I find myself trying to recall every middling detail, to recapture how it had felt, just to try and make sense of it.

What sticks in my mind more firmly than the kiss- which, make no mistake, I haven’t forgotten- is his face the moment after. He’d pulled away before I had been able to process, or even begin to consider kissing him back, and he’d held my face close to his. His eyes were _ apologetic. _Like he’d done something he knew I wouldn’t forgive him for by kissing me. The whole thing had looked and sounded and tasted like Goodbye, which is the one thing I’d never dreamed of considering with Boris. I think I assumed that he and I would follow each other blindly until one of us- me, probably- simply keeled over and died.

I wasn’t angry with him, despite what he’d texted me while I wandered the streets, fresh off the bus and looking for Hobie’s. HOPE U2 ROK. NOT 2 MAD. I suppose, if the roles had been switched, I might think he’d be angry with me for kissing him like that- so anguished and so very inadmissible as an act of friendship. But more than anything, it just made me sad. It had opened up a thousand doors; questions about him, me, us, that neither of us would get to ask. The idea of never seeing him again is agony, but I don’t see what other possibilities there are, given what I know about him. That’s not the way his life works: Boris loses people.

Wherever he is, I hope he’s not alone- no matter what he liked to claim, I know he hates solitude. I felt it in the way he would hold me at night, like he couldn’t believe I was really there. Alone is how he grew up, raising himself in jungles and bleak deserts and shining cities, without anyone to call family, not really. Not until me. 

I hope his dad isn’t with him. I hope Boris fucking ran.

I squeeze my eyes shut, tight. I’m sitting up in Welty’s bed- it isn’t mine in my head- with my knees to my chest, trying to focus on a book but failing, lost again in one of my ‘what if’ spirals. I try to remember what I was doing a year ago today. Probably nothing. Probably I lounged around the playground with Boris and huffed glue till the sun went down, and took for granted the way he had no qualms holding my head in his lap. The year before that? I was at home, and my mother was at work. 

Hobie knocks me out of my reverie through the door. “Are you hungry?” he calls, “How are you feeling?”

The second question is the one he means: I’m starting school again soon, a change he’s sure will rattle me. I don’t know. I have no idea what my limits are anymore.

I ignore the second question. “Sure. Thanks.” I get off the bed and follow him to the kitchen, where we eat and chatter amiably. He brings up Pippa, whose name pokes at my heart painfully, and who apparently doesn’t enjoy her current situation any more than I did when my dad stuck me on a plane. 

Hobie puts the dishes in the sink and smiles at me. “I have a late 19th century oak wood bench downstairs,” he says, “that I could use some young eyes on.” 

I nod eagerly; the workshop is the one place in New York right now where I feel like a person, and not a collection of things that have happened to me and people that I miss. I want things there, I have a goal and a vision that I haven’t felt since my time with Boris (even when that goal was often to see just how many chocolate bars I could fit in my jacket, or how high I could jump off the old slide without twisting my ankle). 

Hobie clearly feels the same way, coming to life as soon as the apron is over his head. We pour over the inlay in the legs for about twenty minutes before there’s a rapid knock on the shop door upstairs. We’re well past closing time, but Hobie runs a hand over my hair and goes to see to the customer. He’s too accommodating, and I know whatever he may sell while I wait for him will be worth far more than what he’ll take for it.

I stare determinedly at the inside of the leg. He’d challenged me to decipher exactly the problem with the grain- what kind of damage precisely leads to this kind of warped pattern. I’m coming up blank when he calls down to me from the third or fourth step. “Theo,” he says stiffly. I turn at his tone, so unnatural, confused even, like he isn’t sure he’s really saying it. “You have a guest.”

A guest? As I begin up the stairs, I rifle through who it might be- Andy, maybe. His mother, even less likely but not impossible. I’m going through the options in my head- Tom Cable? New social worker?- when my footsteps must echo up into the shop. And I hear it.

Uncertain. Wary. 

“...Potter?”

I stop dead in my tracks. Just for a second, in disbelief. I look behind me to Hobie, who’s following me up from the basement. He nods. _Would I lie to you? _his expression reads.

In an instant, I’m by the door, and so is he. He has a bag slung over his shoulder- his school backpack, which looks stuffed with perhaps all the clothes he owns. At his feet is a larger bag, nice enough that I think he must have stolen it from his father.

He’s in his giant coat. The frayed strings of his bracelets dangle down out of the bottom of the sleeve. He’s a few feet away from me, frozen in time like I am.

Seeing him here, in New York, surrounded by the deep browns and golds of Hobart and Blackwell, is so alien to me I have to repress the urge to pinch myself like a child would after a dream. It looks incorrect, him standing here. Like someone has taken a pair of scissors to my memories of him, cut him out of his rightful place on the abandoned playground, and pasted him sloppily into a corner of my life where he doesn’t belong.

Has it only been a few weeks? It feels like ages longer, like it’s been a decade, like we’re different people trying to see what exactly we liked about each other so much way back when.

But then he says it again- “_Potter_.”- and that feeling vanishes as quickly as it arrived. 

“You- you came,” I say dumbly. 

He gives a cheery smirk that I don’t believe. “Promised I would.”

I want more than anything to run into his arms like some girl, breathe in his smell, crush myself with it, but Hobie is behind me and I don’t want him to see. I’m still trying to decide what the right thing to do is when something rockets past my feet.

“_Popchyk!_”

Boris drops to the ground at the sight of the little white blur, laughing loudly as Popchyk licks his face and screeches like he’s being murdered. “He missed me! Potter, look! Oh, yes, Snaps, yes, I know. Is me!” He takes off his backpack so he can roll around on the floor. “Has not been that long, _ poustyshka_, honest!”

I turn awkwardly to Hobie. 

“Hobie, this is, um-“

“Boris!” At the sound of his name, he scrambles to his feet to extend an arm to Hobie. “Yes, we met for just a moment. I’ve heard lots about you,” Hobie says. Boris shakes his hand emphatically, nodding at him like he’s saying something fascinating. 

Hobie seems charmed, if a little disoriented. The large bag seems to have thrown him. I feel panic rise up in my gut. Is this where Boris is going to stay? I hadn’t imagined him living anywhere else but with me whenever I entertained the fantasy of taking him back to New York, but I already had convinced myself I was burdening Hobie with my own presence. Now this?

But Hobie invites Boris to put down his things without skipping a beat, and we’ve already eaten but you must be starving, let me whip something up for you. Boris is nodding, wide-eyed. I don’t know how he got here, but I can’t imagine he was well fed on his journey- he looks even paler than usual, the bags under his eyes more pronounced.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Hobie says and heads into the kitchen. 

I watch him go, aware of Boris’ eyes on the back of my head. I don’t know what invisible force is keeping me from crying, from hugging him or laughing or jumping up and down or _ something _ other than just standing here and looking at anything but him.

“I tried to call,” he says. “Pay phone was shitty.”

I turn back to face him and find myself staring again at his right hand, twitching at his side. Just a few weeks ago, it had been clutching my cheek.

“How’d you get here?” I ask, too loudly, trying to interrupt my own thought.

“Same way as you,” he shrugs. Strangely, he picks his backpack up from the floor and slings it back over his shoulder. “Would have taken a plane but too dicey. Immigration and all that. Not to mention security, obviously.”

I laugh a little. “What, you were gonna bring Xandra’s blow on the plane?” 

He furrows his brows at me. “No....” He says it incredulously, like I should know exactly what he’s talking about.

“How’d you find me?”

“Not a secret where you went, Potter. Lucky I came here first, instead of hunting down the fancy rich people. Knew there weren’t many places to look.”

Popper is on his hind legs, pawing at Boris’ knee. Boris, for once, ignores him, opting instead to look at me dubiously. “Should I not have come?”

“No,” I say quickly, “I’m glad you’re here. Really.”

He smiles, relieved. “You mean it?”

“Of course.” The air between us is still so strange, like something is forcing us apart. Two magnets, being held together at the opposite ends, resisting each other despite our better nature.

“Because- well, I thought maybe…” he stammers, something he rarely does, his knuckles white around the strap of his backpack, “I don’t know. I thought you were angry with me. I understand. If you are- I would be.”

This again. “Jesus, about what?” 

The kiss, obviously, but I’m not going to be the one to say it. Maybe he’ll just rip the bandage off, get it out of the way, and we can go back to just being whatever it was we were, no strings attached, but instead he stands there and looks at me like I have three heads.

“Potter,” he lowers his voice. “The bird.”

My brain ticks through a few options for what on earth he could be referring to. My first thought, impossible, is of course-

“The painting?” 

I almost choke on my own tongue. “Wh-?” I manage.

“I am sorry. So fucking sorry, I do not know why I did that, I have been sick over it-“ 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Alarm bells are blaring through every cell in my body, what is he talking about, what the fuck is he talking about.

“Don’t make me take it out and show it to you. I promise I brought it. Am going to give it back, no problem. Big part of why I came, actually. I knew I could not live with myself, having it.” 

“You… you have the _ painting_.” I’m aware, vaguely, of how slowly I’m speaking, how my voice shakes violently. No, no, I tell myself, the painting is in Welty’s room, in its pillowcase, entombed in tape where it belongs. The only secret that I never told him. 

He takes a step forward, eyes wide. “Oh God, Potter,” he gapes. “...You didn’t open it? Not once, to look?”

He’s stricken- more shocked than I’ve ever seen him- and I suddenly realize that I believe what he’s telling me. I take a step back.

“W-why would you do that,” I try as hard as I can to keep my voice down, I can hear Hobie puttering away in the kitchen, “How did you even _know _ about it?”

He tells me. We got drunk watching _ Dr. No, _and I did the stupidest possible thing I could have done. I feel my mother’s disappointment threaten to drag me to the ground. “But- I- no.” I’m shaking my head frantically as he’s telling me about his little caper, replacing my painting with his textbook with Kotku’s help.

He must see how white I’ve gone, because he says, “Potter, is all okay now. It’s here. Is yours, I don’t want it.” He shoulders his backpack off and holds it out to me, gingerly, with both hands. The back of it is unnaturally flat between the straps, where the painting must sit. I run my fingers up and down the cheap vinyl. 

“But- _ why?_” I’m choked up now, beyond hiding. 

Boris is about to answer when Hobie pokes his head back in. “Hungry?”

I watch Boris devour a grilled cheese, then another, then another. My earlier stomach affliction appears not to have touched him, and he beams at Hobie when he’s done. “That was delicious! I cannot thank you enough, Mr. Hobie. Delicious!”

I’m hugging his backpack in my lap. It must be a strange sight but they’re both ignoring it so I decide not to stop. 

Am I angry with him? Happy to see him? Grateful he brought it back? 

Another topic comes up, one that seemed so dreaded and important a few short minutes ago. “I have to ask,” Hobie says. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

Boris darkens. “No. My father is gone.”

“Gone?”

“He left to Australia, for business. He didn’t want me to follow,” he runs a breadcrumb between his thumb and forefinger. 

Hobie is clearly distraught at this news. “He just left you? What about your mother?”

“Dead.”

Hobie’s hand is pressed over his mouth and chin, the way it always is when he's considering something. While he thinks, I feel Boris looking at me again. I don’t meet his eye.

“Well,” Hobie runs his hand behind his neck, “I can’t make any long term promises, but you’re welcome here. At least until we can figure out where you’re supposed to be.”

Boris is clearly relieved, showering polite thanks onto Hobie profusely. I still feel numb, not in control of my own body. Boris took the painting. He took it, he took it from me.

I can’t help but wonder what he’ll say when I finally corner him and demand a real answer to my question. Had he wanted to sell it? Return it? Trade it for something better? 

(Another wicked thought has been creeping through my brain, throughout all of this. _ Had _ Boris’ last action before I left been some sort of apology? A panicked confession, not of love, but of betrayal? I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel, because I don’t know how I felt before. All I know is I’m hurt.)

Hobie offers Boris Welty’s room for the night. “Theo can stay in Pippa’s; I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” 

My head snaps up. My sour thoughts fall away because _ no_, that’s all wrong. 

“It’s okay, Hobie,” I say quickly. “We can share.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. “I mean, just because I don’t really want to sleep in her room. If that’s okay.” It comes out in a jumble.

I don’t know why I expected suspicion, for Hobie to narrow his eyes and throw us both out, because he just nods solemnly. “Of course.”

For whatever reason, I still don’t shut up. “I’ll just get some blankets for the floor. It’s no big deal.”

Boris’ lips are pressed together as he stares at the table. Trying not to laugh at me.

If Hobie picks up on anything strange, he doesn’t mention it. He just remarks that Boris must be tired, and he is, too, and maybe we should all get an early rest.

I sit on Welty’s bed, facing the open bathroom door as Boris gargles mouthwash loudly at the sink. Popper is gazing at him from the pillows. His backpack is still unopened in my lap.

“You never said how nice this place is,” he says as he comes back into the room. He fingers a cut glass paperweight sitting on the dresser. “Is like movie.”

I clear my throat. He turns to me expectantly.

“You’re really here,” I say.

He seems glad to hear me say it; probably he was expecting me to shout. “Yah,” he chuckles. “Realized only thing for me in Vegas was parties. Drugs, girls, whatever.”

“Is that bad?” I snort.

“For a while, no. But then what? I am going to run out of all of those things before too long. End up like my father. Or yours.”

I nod. He waits for me to say something else, and when I don’t oblige, he starts stripping down to his underwear. He probably needs a shower, based on the state of him, but he plops down onto the bed facefirst. Popchyk, who had clearly been anticipating this, runs to curl up on his head. “This bed is huge,” he says to me through a laugh. “And so nice! You must sleep all day in this, Potter.”

Slowly, I stand and tuck the backpack under the bed. I _ mhmm _ in agreement, but it’s not true. I’ve been sleeping terribly. 

I consider just climbing into bed in my underwear, too, like we did most nights in Vegas. But it feels different now. I change into a shirt and oversized boxers, and even bother to brush my teeth. 

When I get back to the bed, his eyes are already closed, his body bare and awkwardly angled on top of the covers. Against my better judgement, I nudge him. 

“Boris.” 

His eyes snap open as he and Popchyk both jump. He looks at me quizzically for a moment, like he doesn’t remember where he is. 

“Aren’t you cold?”

He nods sleepily and climbs under the sheets. In a bed this size, it’s almost like we’re in different countries. I take off my glasses and lay down to see that if I reached my hand out as far as it would go, I may barely touch him. There’s something profoundly wrong about it.

“I lied,” I blurt. 

He opens his eyes again, this time turning to face me. “About what?”

“I haven’t been sleeping,” I angle myself so we’re face to face, but still two whole feet apart. He shifts in and out of focus. “I hate this fucking bed. It’s too soft, and too big.” 

Then, as casually as I can: “But I really… really I can’t sleep without _ you_. I think.” 

He blinks. His face is unreadable. He waits for me to go on.

“It was easier to sleep with you there. That’s all. I don’t know why I lied.” 

He reaches up to scratch slowly behind Popchyk’s ear. “Is okay. I lied worse.” 

We lay in silence. Is this what it is now? Was Vegas some bubble where we clung to each other out of desperation, and now that bubble is popped? So we’re just two orphans, in a too big bed. Nothing tying us together.

“What are you thinking about?” Boris says softly. 

“Nothing.”

“Not nothing.” I see from his eyes that I’m wrong. About all of it. He inhales deeply before asking: “You still think is easier? With me, I mean.”

I think back to his breath easy in my ear, his hands drawing patterns on my collarbone when he thought I was sleeping. Yes. Of course.

I can’t say that, though. So I turn the light off and move closer to him without a word. 

The embrace I had first wanted at the door happens now, of its own accord. His arms open as soon as the light is off, and in an instant we're a tangled mess of interlocked limbs, knobby elbows and calloused skin and dirty hair tickling my face. I don’t know who’s squeezing tighter, but I know that the pressure from all sides is calming me down off a precipice I didn’t realize I was on.

One hand is at the nape of my neck, the other knotted up into the shirt on my back. His face is burrowed in between my neck and my shoulder. I can feel his brows knit together as he holds me tighter, tighter. His legs are up around my hips. It all feels so desperate; I have no doubt that if a cyclone were to tear through the building, they would find us in the wreckage, wrapped up together just like this.

Unknown minutes pass. The only indication time is passing at all is the occasional repositioning of Popchyk on the pillow behind Boris’ head, and the fingertips curling around and around the hair on the back of my neck. 

“Theo.” 

I almost pull away at the sound of my actual name, soft in my ear. _Tee-oh._

“You want to know why I took it,” he sounds like he might be on the verge of tears. “But I don’t know this.”

I turn so my mouth isn’t pressed to him anymore. I want him to hear me. “It’s okay. You brought it back-“

He lurches away, so he can look right at me. I’m aware of his hands still wrapped around my back. “But I wasn’t going to,” he says forcefully. “Was going to keep it. Just to see what I could do with it, what I could… fucking _ get_. Is so wrong. Shameful.” He’s insistent, almost angry-sounding in his determination to apologize to me. 

Since the moment his fingers knotted into my t-shirt, though, I’ve felt my center of gravity return. The red-alert panic I felt in the shop when he held his bag out to me is gone. The painting is back. Boris is back. How could I be angry with him? How could he be looking at me with such heartbreak in his eyes?

I have a sudden, jarring urge to kiss him, which I adamantly ignore. 

I don’t think I can look at him. I tuck my head under his chin. How we laid when I had a nightmare. 

“You’re both here,” I manage. I hope it’s enough.

* * *

Boris and Hobie get along famously. They both have a penchant for philosophizing, in ways much more optimistic about life than my own bleak ponderings. The beloved “intellectual talks” he used to have with my father find a new home in Hobie, one that I actually enjoy listening to, since no one is mocking anyone else’s accent, and both sides are wickedly well-informed.

It’s obvious how unaccustomed Boris is to being looked after properly; he’s absolutely baffled when he comes home late and Hobie asks him where he’s been, and makes him promise not to do it again. It takes some readjustment for him to understand household rules and familial responsibility and boring things most kids learn when they’re six. But he seems to decide that having Hobie there, or maybe having me, is more than worth the eleven o’clock curfew.

His admiration of Hobie rivals my own; he always leans forward to hear him talk, asks him questions about the most innocuous things he says, jumps up to help with even the smallest errand. The affection is mutual, as is especially obvious when Hobie comes home one day with armfuls of Eastern European recipe books. 

Still, Hobie becomes aware of our sleeping arrangement too quickly for my taste. He slips into our room early one morning to collect dirty glasses for washing while Boris is wrapped around me from behind, chin hooked over my shoulder. I keep my eyes closed to avoid seeing whatever Hobie’s face may look like. He glances between us a few times over breakfast but otherwise stays silent.

* * *

The hardest part is paperwork. Boris’ immigration status is in the lurch, and there are thousands of hoops to jump through just so he can stay another year. Hobie ends up spending hours on the phone with representatives from Boris’ father’s company, who have the only copies of his visa. During these phone calls, Boris always paces around the kitchen uneasily, gnawing at his fingernails and muttering under his breath in Polish.

Sometimes he plops into the chair next to me out of frustration, and sometimes I get up the nerve to squeeze his hand.

In the meantime, he applies to the same college program as me, and does even better on the entry exam than I do- a fact he lords over me, not because he cares, but because he knows I secretly do. I scowl one too many times and he makes a show of ripping his results into a million pieces. “Please, Potter! You know I am just playing!” And he spends the rest of the day eyeing me carefully to make sure I’m not angry.

People like him at school, much more than they like me. I don’t mind- it was always like that in Vegas, too. Boris and his weird little friend. No one seems to understand why he talks to me, and as a pair we certainly look completely mismatched, the hard-edged Slav and his bookish, bourgeois sidekick.

(Before school, Hobie had taken us out to replace Boris’ ratted out wardrobe. We came back with nicer versions of his black jeans, and T-shirts with bands he actually liked on them instead of whatever discarded shirts he could find. He needed real winter clothes, too, which is how he ended up with a huge black denim jacket that ballooned out around him, dwarfing him almost as much as his old blazer did. Still, he loved it, so much so that when it got cold and he needed a real coat with lining, he took to wearing two sweaters and that fucking denim jacket instead.)

We build a reputation. We do a lot of what we did in school in Nevada, but here, the teachers actually give a shit and we get caught. A lot. Hiding alcohol in our lockers, stealing from the lost and found. We don’t need to do any of it- and we do it a _ lot _ less than we did back then- but whenever it happens it’s a big scandal amongst the Upper East Side student body. 

I begin to think we build a reputation for something else, too. I don’t know for sure, and I’m sure as hell not about to ask Boris what he thinks, but sometimes I catch people staring at us differently. When Boris leans up against my locker, a little too close. When we share a cigarette on the sidewalk before school. When we exchange our secret glances and pass notes to each other in class. People look. It’s enough to make me want to bolt sometimes, but Boris doesn’t seem to notice or care.

Because despite our much improved lifestyle (and shiny new molars), there is one thing we still never talk about. 

We haven’t done anything like that since he arrived in New York. Not once. We’ve come close; a wandering hand, a darkened gaze, a sudden, impulsive press of lips to my shoulder blade. But nothing further. And the kiss hasn’t come up, either. 

Maybe that’s what’s stopping us, I think, when I do let myself think about it. I have a feeling that if we were to open those floodgates again, there wouldn’t be any room for denial. That would be it. That kiss had been, at least for me, a sort of certificate. Authenticating everything I’d feared I felt for him. One hundred percent real. So real, in fact, I’d almost said it. 

It’s almost funny to consider what would have happened if I had blurted “I love you” to him before jumping in the cab, never to return. Looking at him now, leaning over a book at our windowsill- I don’t know. I think he might have said it back.

He’s started keeping his thumbnails painted black. Just something I’ve noticed.

We get a voicemail one morning from Mr. Pavlikovsky. When Hobie tells Boris this, all the color rushes from his face so quickly I worry he’ll pass out. It turns out he’d just called to say he’d heard about the issues with immigration. He wanted to help, and to thank us from the bottom of his heart for looking after his son.

Boris is still so shaken after listening to it that I grab his wrist and force him to tell me. He confesses that they’d had a fight before he left Vegas. A big one. His father told him they would be leaving to Australia, and Boris refused to follow. It had gotten physical, as was far from uncommon, but- Boris tells me in a hushed voice- 

“I hit back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I took big heavy boot off my foot and knocked him over the head with it till he fell over at my feet.”

“Jesus fuck.”

He nods. “Was worried I killed him for a moment. Soon as I saw him breathing I grabbed as much as I could and left. Just like that.”

It goes against the story he’d told us- that his father had left without him- but I’m glad to hear it. I don’t tell him this, but I look at the scar over his eyebrow sometimes and wish his father had really been dead.

* * *

Boris doesn’t show much of an interest in antiques, as much as he politely nods whenever Hobie tries to show him the ropes. I end up having to pull Hobie aside and tell him that Boris is just being respectful, since I know that he would never catch on if I didn’t. 

He asks about Welty a lot, too. Those conversations are always subdued, but sparkle with the same energy I’d felt with him in the museum. Boris wants to know him, because suddenly he built the two most important people in Boris’ life.

When Pippa visits, it becomes much stranger to talk about him. When Pippa visits, everything is strange.

Boris has been calling Hobart and Blackwell home for five months when she comes for a visit. She knows all about him from her phone calls with Hobie, of course, and beams when he answers the door.

She throws her arms up around his shoulders, “You must be Boris!”

They take to each other just as quickly. They sit across the kitchen counter, gabbing about music all morning long. I sit next to her, watching them. I feel horrid. 

When I’m alone with her, it’s all clear as day: I feel nothing but the urge to hold her hand, brush my hands over her cheeks, kiss her, even. She talks to me about her life overseas and I can barely pay attention because I’m overwhelmed with Pippa and the lingering, two year old taste of the morphine lollipop.

But when Boris is around, it gets muddled up. Seeing them in the same room is like forcing my foot into the wrong shoe and my perception gets skewed.

He knows how I feel about her, how I’ve always felt, yet he doesn’t seem to want to leave us alone together. I want to believe he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he just likes Pippa and wants to spend time with her before she has to leave. But it’s too random. And he asks too many questions about her after she goes to bed.

“Did she write you back?”

“What?”

“In Vegas, you wrote her all the time. Did she write back?”

“No. Not really.”

He’s sitting up on the arm of the couch, looking down at where I sit with his lower lip between his teeth. 

“What,” I say, exasperated already.

He tilts his head to the side, one of his funny habits that Hobie likes to compare to Popchyk's. “What does she study in school? Her favorite subject.”

“What?”

“What does she like to study?”

“Is this a trick?”

He shrugs. “No. Not a trick. Just wondering if you know.”

I’m about to spit the answer at him along with a middle finger when I find that I do not, in fact, know. A flash of violent indignation shoots through me, as being around Pippa tends to bring out.

“Fuck you. It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter?”

“You know what I mean,” I feel my ears get hot. What is he accusing me of?

He sits, chin in palm, elbows digging into his knees, seemingly unfazed by my rising temper. “You love this girl, I thought.” There’s a hint of sadness in his voice that I don’t have time to overanalyze.

“I- It’s complicated. Stay out of it.”

“I am just saying that I have been with her all weekend, and she is not like what you have told me, Potter. I think maybe-“

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” 

He sighs. I know as well as he does that I’m being overly defensive, but something about Boris of all people getting on me about my feelings for Pippa rankles me so much that I decide to sleep on the couch, and tell him to go to bed without me.

“Fine,” he sighs again as he turns away. “But if you’re making a move on redhead, do it soon. She’s not coming back for half a year.”

And yes, it pisses me off that he knows this and I do not.

He walks back to our room with his head down, hands deep in his pockets. I could easily stop him and apologize, but I do no such thing. I lay down on the couch, in all my clothes, and stare at the ceiling with my arms crossed. 

_Make a move on redhead_, I think. _How fucking crass do you have to be._ _I’m not about to ‘make a move’ on anyone. _

There’s also the fact that I wouldn’t know how- I’m not very experienced for a 16 year old. I’ve only ever kissed two people. (And they’re both in this house, talking to each other like best pals.)

I suppose I’m not a virgin by anyone’s standards, though it’s something I won’t exactly admit. To anyone, not even the person whom I did all those things with.

But I’m not about to make a move on Pippa. I lay on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. I try to picture it, what it would be like… if I did. I think about her lips on mine, my hands in her hair, working her sweater off her shoulders. 

Even in my fantasy there’s something not right. Pippa is incorruptible. Thinking about her bare skin seems wrong, somehow. She’s the girl in the museum. When I think about her in my truest hours, I am standing in between her and my mother. 

My mother. What would she tell me if she was sitting on this couch, my legs slung over hers? Well, a moot question- I already know.

She was trapped in an unhappy marriage for almost fourteen years. And she knew it. Every day she woke up knowing she didn’t love the man beside her, and she kept going anyhow. She tried to hide her disdain for him from me, but I knew her better than anyone. 

And I knew what she was talking about when she would give me advice. She had a habit of blowing the things I said out of proportion: I would tell her an innocent story about my day and she found a way to turn it into a grand life lesson- it annoyed me, sometimes, to tell a joke and get a lecture in return. But looking back on it now, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to see her eyes harden that way again. _ Now, puppy, seriously…. _

I told her once, a year before she died, about a new girl at school- cute, I remember, with long braids stretching down her back. She’d said, “It’s important to remember: pick someone who reaches out to _ you_, Theo. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“No-?”

“Don’t pick someone just because of who they _ are_.” She was wearing a red sweater. “It matters just as much how they make you feel.” She pushed the hair out of her face. “What I’m trying to say is- well, you shouldn’t be taking care of someone. You take care of each other. That make sense?”

I’d nodded at the time, uncomfortable and eager to be done with the conversation. But thinking back, it does make sense. I don’t know how to take care of myself, that much is clear. And me and Pippa are the same; it’s the reason I love her so much. So how could I even start? 

Since my mother died, there aren’t that many people who have taken care of me. Pippa certainly isn’t one of them, through no fault of her own. 

There’s Mrs. Barbour and her herd of high-strung Manhattanite royalty, gazing at me across mahogany tables with pity. Not love.

Hobie, of course. Hobie loves me like one of his own; no one could have taken care of me like he has. 

_ But that isn’t what she meant, is it, Theo. You’re fully aware that that isn’t what she meant. _

Don’t think I don’t know. Because I do. And I have. And I probably always will. 

But this thing I know, and have known, and will- it’s massive. It’s massive and it means more than just having someone.

Before and After. Everything is Before and After. I have spent the last two and a half years trying to get to Before, trying to plant my roots there like a tree, hide from the bright sun of After so I don’t grow in the direction of its blinding light. Before is where my mother is. 

And every way I can stay in Before, I have. I’ve worn clothes two sizes too small, because she bought them for me. I’ve taken old, overlong routes to the subway because that’s the way she always went. I avoid places, places I loved, because the last time I was there, she was alive. I fall in love with people who I saw Before. Just moments Before.

Trying to be who I was Before may seem futile, but it’s all I have. The idea of looking into a mirror and seeing anyone other than the person she knew is terrifying to me; the worst case scenario. Who am I, if not tied to her memory? 

I want nothing more, right now, than to be holding the painting against my heart. But it’s in our room. It lives in our closet, at the bottom of a box we pile high with socks so Hobie won’t see. It’s our secret now, not just mine. I keep expecting that to bother me.

Of course, I can’t go in there now and get it. Even if he’s fast asleep, he would still be laying there. And seeing him right now, drooling with Popchyk on his head, feels dangerous.

He takes care of me. We take care of each other. Maybe for a while it was because no one else would. But now, safe in a stable household- no neglect, no beatings- we do it because we want to.

I know. I knew as I watched him shrink out of sight from the taxicab window, I knew from the night I dragged him home from his house, trailing blood behind us. Maybe even earlier. Maybe the day I met him.

He is not Before. He is the only thing in my life that has nothing to do with Before.

Boris is only After. He eats, sleeps, breathes it. The past is nothing to him, an obstacle, something to weigh you down- the way I want it to. I _ want _ the past to devour me, drag me down into its muddy depths and never let me go. I refuse to have faith, as he does, in the future. Because she is not there.

Yet he’s the only person currently in my life I never would have met if it wasn’t for that day. And the only person in my life that I am certain I need.

I consider the concept of After. For the first time, I wonder what I would look like if I leapt up into it head first, allowed Boris to pull me from the sludge of Before and wash me clean. 

Most obviously- I would not be the boy who asked his mother about girls. She always got _ excited _ when the topic came up, and I think of it as a betrayal to choose the thing I’m becoming surer by the second I want.

But why? Why? She wanted me, above all, to be loved. To feel I know my place in the world, to be connected to those around me. To be happy. So far, in this, I have failed her.

She never met Boris. Would she like him? Would she laugh at his nasty jokes, turn her nose up at his cigarette smell? Does it matter?

Or does it matter more that when I look at Boris, I feel distant echoes of the feeling she had wanted for me. I don’t think I’m capable of all of it. I don’t think I will ever be a happy person, a content person. I will never wake up in the morning and beam at the prospect of a shiny new day. But with Boris- at least I have a choice. Before or After. 

Even if I choose Before every single time- he is the only thing that lays out any other option than despair.

Before I change my mind, I get up from my place on the couch and tread back to our room as quietly as I can without slowing down. 

He’s awake, the light under the door tells me. Thank God, or I surely would have lost my nerve. He’s perched on the windowsill, his favorite spot, trying to blow cigarette smoke out the window as discreetly as he can.

He looks up at the sound of the door. “Don’t tell Mr. Hobie,” he says, waving the smoke out with his hand. “I needed it.”

“I won’t.”

He leans his head back. I can see the hollow of this throat. I’m about to run, I can feel myself shrinking away. Instead, I press on, plant my feet in front of each other until I’m standing in front of him. He looks up at me through the corner of his eye. “...What?”

I’m trying to shove words together in my brain but it’s only resulting in a cacophony of poorly formulated confessions which, if he were to hear them, might land me in the hospital.

“Potter-“

“How come we never talk about it?” I blurt. It’s the first full sentence that comes to mind. It hangs thick in the air for a moment.

“Talk about what?”

I feel shitty, this was a mistake. “You know,” I’m suddenly much quieter. “Don’t make me say it, just- how come… we _ never _ talk about it?”

He must see in my face what I mean. He clenches his jaw and tosses his cigarette into a glass of water sitting next to him on the sill. He turns back to me. “We can. If you want.”

I should probably sit down on the side of the bed so I can face him, but I have momentum, and there’s something about being temporarily taller than him that makes this whole thing easier. I stay standing. “Alright, why’d you kiss me?” I challenge. 

Boris was clearly expecting something else: the sex, probably, which would be much easier for him to write off, and rough enough for his skewed worldview to make sense of. He flinches. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Was it because of the painting?” I press.

This seems to genuinely surprise him. “What?”

“Did you-“ I can’t say it again “-_do that _ because you felt bad. About the painting.”

“No! I swear,” his eyes are still wide. “Truthfully, I do not even know what you mean by that.” He chuckles. I don’t.

“Okay. So why’d you do it?”

He holds his hands up in his old gesture: _ what do you want me to say. _ “Because you were leaving!” he splutters. “And I didn’t think I could follow, and I knew you would just be angry with me over the bird-“

“You just said-“

“Not like that! Was like, I knew you would hate me. And knew it was my last chance to do it.”

I swallow. “So. You’d wanted to for a while.”

He nods, his fingers twitching for another cigarette. We don’t say anything for a minute. Finally, he sniffs and looks back up at me. “And you?”

“What about me.”

“You have this red haired girl.” 

My heart sinks. I think back to the two of them talking over the counter; my steaming jealousy of them both. Pippa at the museum, her eyes landing momentarily on my mother before turning back towards the goldfinch on the wall.

“No, I don’t,” I mutter. “I never did.”

“But you want her.” He’s resigned to it. It strikes me that he’s not acting too differently than I’ve seen him before, in his darker moments- whatever intimate side of him that exists, he has never been hiding it from me. 

“I don’t,” I say again, with more conviction. “With her… It’s complicated. But it’s not _ that_. I don’t want her.”

He barks his sharp laugh in my face. “Harsh, Potter.”

“Shut up, you fucking said it,” I can’t help but smile. “You know what I mean.”

He starts mocking me again- _ Real change of steps, Potter- _and I feel him sliding back into our routine. But I’m not done with this; if I stop now, correct his phrasing and hit him playfully, I won’t start again. 

I can see myself ten years from now, forcing down every instinct I have, just because I didn’t say this, now.

So I say it.

“I love you.”

It comes out more forcefully than I perhaps intended it- the wrong words get emphasized and it sounds like an angry question. But it stops Boris dead in his tracks.

“...You know that, right?” I add.

He smiles for a split second, like he’s going to laugh, before his face goes slack and he’s nothing but two giant black eyes boring into me. Slowly, he shakes his head no.

“I guess I thought you knew.” He always seemed, in Vegas, so much more in control of our relationship than me. Even if he didn’t know where we were headed, he always seemed fine with where we were. But about this I was wrong. Clearly he was as lost as I was.

“How would I have,” he breathes. “You are always Pippa this, and Pippa that, and then we wake up after being with each other and you say nothing. Potter, no. I did not know.”

“But that’s not real,” I insist. “In Vegas, when I talked about her… it’s like she’s a character in a book.” (Or a figure in a painting, which I don’t say.) “And _ you _ were, um.... Sometimes I think you’re the only real thing.”

I can’t help but feel guilty. He always seemed so relaxed, carefree and independent- I thought I was playing catch-up. 

When, as it turned out, he stayed up at night watching my chest rise and fall, combing my hair over and over with his fingers. He would drag me in from the street, the rooftops, the bottom of the pool. He would wipe away my tears and pray to powers he didn’t believe in, beg them to let him take some of my pain for himself. He trailed behind me, scrambling to pick up my broken, bloodied pieces and fasten them back on in the only ways he knew how. And he did it all while positive I would never feel the same way about him that he did about me.

I know all of this because he tells me. His eyes are glassy as he does. His voice is even, his words well-measured, almost as if he’s rehearsed it in his head. 

I only stop him when he brings up another night I don’t remember, when I apparently had attempted to burn my dad’s house to the ground. 

“I wouldn’t have done it.”

“You would have.”

“There’s no way-“

“Potter, I was there. You were not. Believe me, you would have.”

He’s lit another cigarette. “Why don’t you sit,” he tells me, wearily, like we’re a cop and robber who have been in the interrogation room all night. Forming a sort of respect for one another, a mercury morning alliance. 

I finally sit down on the bed. He offers me the cigarette but I refuse (Hobie has a rule against them in Welty’s bedroom that we usually follow, but tonight we’re breaking all kinds of rules, aren’t we?). He knocks his knee lightly against mine. 

“What?” I ask.

“What now, Potter?” he says austerely. “What are we supposed to do now?”

I honestly didn’t think I’d get this far. I feel a laugh bubbling up at the back of my throat. “I have no idea,” I choke out. 

He cracks a smile, which turns to a grin, which turns to a quiet, head-shaking laugh of his own. “_Eto bezoomiye_,” he says around his cigarette.

“English, dude.”

He throws his arms up. “Is crazy!”

He’s right, of course. It’s absolutely insane; insane to think I’m sitting here, listening to him so calmly as he explains to me how many times he's stopped himself from kissing me.

Fuck it. I stand back up. He looks at me quizzically before I tug unceremoniously at the shoulder of his shirt. It’s one of the new ones that Hobie bought him, long sleeves, soft black fabric that puckers at the spot where I pull it, the gesture of ours meaning _ get the fuck up, man. _

He obliges without protest, putting out his cigarette without looking away from me. Something in the air has changed; it’s thicker, harder to breathe. 

I’ve grown a lot since Vegas- we’re almost at eye level, which makes it all much harder to avoid, says the voice in the back of my head who always wants me to avoid these things. I don’t listen to it, because he’s just closer now than he was before. That’s all.

Boris brings his hands up slowly, slowly, to rest them on either side of my face. It brings back a memory, of a hot night and bleary, silent confessions and cocaine running new through my veins. It’s that, but in slow motion. Like all the time I’ve spent since attempting to recreate it in my head is finally paying off.

Except we’re all but sober, and we’re safe, and we have no place to be. 

And we both know.

He brings his face closer to mine, and there’s no Goodbye about it this time. (It’s more of a Hello, really. A beginning.) Right before our lips meet, he stops.

The corners of his mouth quirk up. “Say it again.”

“What?” I whisper.

“The thing you said. Say it again.”

“Fuck off.”

Then he kisses me, and neither of us need to say it at all.

* * *

If Hobie notices something different between us at first, he says nothing. But before long, it’s hard to avoid. Whatever we are- ‘boyfriends’ seems like altogether the wrong word, one I could never associate with the knife-edge way Boris loves me- it obviously isn’t friends. He sits me down after school one day when Boris has been held back for detention.

I’d tried to stay and wait for him to get out, but he’d insisted I go home, which I’m now regretting because Hobie is sitting in his chair looking at me like I’ve committed an international crime. “What is it?” I say anxiously when he tells me to have a seat.

I’m expecting to be in trouble, since Boris got caught smoking in the bathroom (again) and I’d been with him (again). The only reason I wasn’t sitting in that frigid classroom alongside him right now was because I had run out to my locker to grab my other lighter and happened to be away from the scene when the Vice Principal showed up.

Our criminal tendencies, while nowhere near as prolific as they were in Vegas, have been hard to shake. I often feel guilty for putting Hobie through so many school visits.

But that’s not what this is about. 

“You’re not in any trouble, Theo,” he assures me. “I just want to talk.”

I put my backpack at my feet and perch awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. Hobie is to my right, and I find myself avoiding his all-knowing gaze. _ Can we please get this over with, _I don’t say.

“I’ve been trying to find a way to figure all this out myself, I confess,” he begins. “But I think it’s best to just be forthright and ask, since you’re almost an adult and, Theo, believe me when I say that I trust you.” He inhales deeply. “I have noticed… that you and Boris seem closer than-“

A denial is out of my mouth before he can even get halfway through his sentence, and he puts up both hands like I’m a wild horse that needs breaking. “It’s alright! I just wanted to make sure that you’re safe. And you’re being responsible?”

Oh god, Hobie is asking me about condoms, he’s really asking me about condoms and I am probably a shade of purple previously unseen to man. I nod quickly. I wish Boris was here. He wouldn’t break a sweat over this- he’d crack a joke, probably. I want to disappear into the couch cushions.

“I’m not trying to put you on the spot, Theo,” he says wisely. “I’m just making sure all is well.”

I find out later that this conversation was as agonizing to Hobie as it was to me, and he’d spent weeks beforehand considering what should be done about the fact that Boris and I were obviously having sex. On one hand, Hobie didn’t want to be complicit in teenage shenanigans, as he’ll put it. (And as Boris puts it, societal rules state clearly that giving two teenagers a safe space to fuck each other is a bad thing). But on the other hand, Hobie sees himself in me; a young man estranged from the normal proceedings of the world, seeking refuge in the past but finding it in someone else instead. For him it had been Welty, and he feels he could never take what he had away from me.

There’s also the fact that having Boris around the house is, I’m sure, a lot more fun than just being stuck with me. 

* * *

It’s almost troubling and almost funny how much of our relationship stays the same. He still throws a thoughtless arm around my shoulders when we walk down the hall, and I still glance around when he does, just to see who might be looking at us the wrong way. He still holds me when I have nightmares, and I still smack him in the teeth if he says some reckless shit I don’t like, or even just for fun. Of course it’s all out in the open now, and when he kisses my knuckles afterwards I don’t have to stay up all night wondering what on earth it might have meant.

I had expected a seismic shift, blood-deep, a reinvention of both of us. But it’s not; it’s better. It’s the boy I had in Vegas, and all of his good parts, and all of the joy and the intimacy and the wildness of him, but none of the other stuff. There isn’t panicked confusion after waking up with my head in his lap, or hesitation when he presses his lips to tear stains on my cheeks. And then there’s the fact that we bathe regularly, and his hair is soft when I pull it. We’re not starving anymore; quite the opposite, and Boris makes a grand oath that he will get fabulously, beautifully fat off Hobie’s babkas. 

And Boris doesn’t come home with purpling bruises obscuring his face. Or tiny shards of glass sticking out of his palms after a bottle had been thrown against a wall and he’d been pushed into its carnage. (I spend a lot less time huddled over him with a First Aid kit, biting my tongue.)

He loves Hobie, but I see him waiting for it. Boris gets in trouble with him more often than I do, and even when it happens, it’s not as if Hobie so much as raises his voice, but Boris nevertheless comes back to our room shaken and jumpy.

I think being away from Mr. Pavlikovsky has made him realize how afraid he’d been of him. No more does he insist “my father loves me”. And he has nightmares, like I do, that his father will come pounding on the door and take him away to live in Ukraine or Poland without a word to Hobie or me; that we’ll wake up and find Boris has vanished in the night. “And then you think I left,” he says to me, rattled by one of these dreams. “And I have no way to call and say no, please, I am trying to get back to you. I am just gone.” 

I watch his scars heal in real time. His dreams are fucked up but less violent than mine, which still keep us both up and probably always will. 

Because- and make no mistake about this- despite how it may seem, I am not _ happy. _I still live with all of my worst impulses clutched tightly to my chest. I still am unable to look at the world as anything but a mass of rot and disease, and I still wake every morning wondering why I have to live in it.

But at least I am alive. 

More than I was before, I am alive. I had trudged through the world, an animated corpse, for months after my mother died. But when I was in Las Vegas, I returned to life, as desperate and as fucked up a life it may have been. Leaving, coming back to New York, was supposed to reinvigorate me- My hometown! Where she raised me!- but on that bus ride, I felt the life in my chest peel away, scattered to the plains, until the old festered corpse was the one knocking on Hobie’s door.

I am alive again. I know that I am alive when Hobie shows me how to repair the metal tracks of a chest-on-chest’s drawer, and he ruffles my hair. When I do it without his help for the first time and I actually see him welling up. 

I know I am alive when Boris pulls me behind the secluded dumpster in our school’s cramped parking lot before class and crashes our lips together, kisses me till I can’t see straight, just so he can turn and laugh wickedly at how flustered I am as he walks away. And I know it when I get him back for it later.

It starts to not seem like such a crime.

* * *

Boris asks me, one day, almost a year after he showed up on our doorstep. Hobie is out running errands, and I’m sitting on the couch with Boris leaning up against my legs. I fiddle absentmindedly with his hair; a reflection of an afternoon in Vegas I don’t quite remember.

“Why _ did _ you bring it up?”

“What?”

He cranes his neck to look at me. “You and me. That night. We had been silent for what, years, and then you bring it up that night.”

“Oh. It’s stupid.”

He barks a laugh at me. “Bet you lot of moneys it’s not.”

I tell him about my imaginary Before and After. He turns and listens intently, his chin resting on his knee. 

“You told me this before.”

I blink. “What? When?”

“At your house, after school once. We cut out and got drunk way too early- you end up running into desert, completely _ v gavno, _no shirt, bright sun, and you lay down. You tell me to leave you. You beg me.”

I feel embarrassment flood into my ears as he continues. 

“And usually I was able to move you when you were like this, if I really needed to. But- I remember this day well, is funny you bring it up- this time you made up your mind. ‘Leave me, Boris.’ I end up laying down next to you in sand, waiting for you to let me drag you home. I remember you let me hold your hand tight to my chest, like this,” he demonstrates, pressing his own fist close to his heart. “And didn’t get up till past dark.”

I check over my shoulder, to double check Hobie isn’t on his way in. “Was that the night of _ Dr. No?” _

He shakes his head. “Was after that. By the time I get you home we are both bright red, burnt like tomatoes. We get in the pool, and there you tell me. ‘I feel my life has split in half, Borya.’”

“I called you Borya?”

“No,” he says after considering for a moment. “I don’t think you did. But felt like you did, if that makes sense.”

I nod. 

“And you said that you didn’t know. What was keeping you on this side.”

It’s clear this had hurt him to hear. I slide off the sofa and sit cross-legged on the floor beside him. “Boris, the reason I asked you about it that night-? It was because I realized that.”

“That you have nothing?”

“No,” I wince. “I realized what was keeping me here. Without my mom.”

I hope he can figure it out without me saying it. I tell him in our secret language, catching his eye. His mouth falls open just a little, and I know he understands.

“And this is a good thing? Being in now, and not then?”

“I didn’t used to think so.”

“But now?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

A few hours later, we’re still on the floor, leaned up against the sofa and watching a TCM marathon, when he says: “I know what we can do.” He’s quiet, which confuses me, since even though Hobie’s back from his errands, he’s down in the workshop where he’ll never hear us. “I know what we can do about your After,” he says.

I lift my head off his shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“You say you think is best for you to not be stuck in before. This means you’re ready to do that?”

He’s using the tone he always used before he revealed a scheme to me- it usually involved stealing or bartering for acid or something nefariously equivalent. But there’s not the hint of mischief in his voice that I’m used to. 

“I guess so,” I say uneasily.

He looks pointedly into my eyes. “Potter, we have to give it back.”

* * *

It takes some convincing, and one embarrassing night when he lets me sleep with it clutched to my chest, and I cry until I don’t know what crying means anymore. But we take it to Hobie.

He’s stunned as I explain what had happened: Welty’s shaking hand as he pointed at it in the rubble, my nervous precautions to protect it, Boris’ theft and subsequent return.

He listens stoically, stopping to ask a few calm questions but otherwise giving no reaction. When I’m done, he reaches across the kitchen table and pulls the newspaper wrapped package closer to him with one long finger.

It sits in front of him. I see tears spring up in his eyes, but they don’t fall. I know he is thinking of Welty; what he would do if he was sitting here.

I am positive, as I have been since the day I took it, that I will go to jail, but I do not. Any traumatized child, as is explained to me, would have done the same. My reluctance to return it, while dubious, was not considered criminal given the circumstances. 

I’m sure that if I were less cute, less pitiable, and “less white and rich,” as Boris points out, I would not have been so lucky. 

Boris pretends to Hobie that he’s not appalled when the reward money goes into our college savings and not into our pockets, but later he throws up his hands when we talk about it alone in the safety of our room. I don’t give a single shit about the money. I know he doesn’t either, deep down, when I catch him watching me as I run a finger over today’s newspaper. My finch sits underneath a headline, in color, but dead. Now that I’ve held it in my hands, no reproduction will ever be anything else to me.

It’s a big story for a few days; I see it on the evening news, _ Dutch Masterpiece Recovered, _the story goes that an anonymous source led police to the safe recovery of the painting. No more details than that are given.

Boris can tell how empty I feel without it, even if all I say is how glad I am that it’s back in the world. It’s not untrue, I am glad that others will have it, but I can’t help the voice whispering through the caverns of my chest, telling me that they will never love my painting the way that they should. The way I do.

He pulls me to him tightly that night, and says, “I’m sorry I made you give it back.”

“You didn’t make me,” I say to my fingers that run along his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.” My voice is unconvincingly flat.

“Potter.”

“Boris.”

“Let’s go see it.”

* * *

Before it’s shipped back to The Hague, it’s being displayed at the Met for a few weeks. An act of defiance, a patriotic fuck you to the people who wanted it destroyed along with the walls it hangs on.

We stand at the bottom of the steps below the main entrance. The last time I was here, my mother was alive. The last time I was here, my mother was dead.

One of the banners that hangs between the massive columns is emblazoned with the image of the goldfinch, close up, staring down at me forty feet tall. I feel the blood rush to my feet.

My tinnitus is threatening to return when his voice yanks me back into reality.

“Theo.”

Boris stands to my right, in his denim jacket. It’s a cold, cloudless day. His nose is red, his hair blowing into his eyes from the wind. In this light he looks pale, translucent almost as he gazes at the museum. 

“This is where you went in?” he asks evenly, and looks up at me with worried eyes. I’m taller than him now, by a noticeable margin.

I nod. My eyes dart up to a spot under the portico, thirty or so feet from the main entrance. I can see us: me, grumpy and anxious, hungry but unwilling to say anything about it. Wanting nothing more than to just go home. And my mother, in her black and white shoes and her pale scarf, shaking out her umbrella and frowning up at the clouds.

I can hear us.

_ “Maybe we should go in and poke around for a bit till it stops.” _

_ “Um- Sure.” _

_ “Might as well. We’re not going to get a cab in all this.” _

I watch the two ghosts duck inside the doors and disappear before I can do anything to stop them. 

Something about it feels final. They are gone, both of them, as soon as the doors close behind them. 

Opposed to what my state-assigned therapist told me over and over, I died that day, too. My hopeless clamoring to recover the things I used to have had always included myself. But the boy in the rumpled school uniform has vanished into the stone building, and will be crushed under its weight at any moment. I suddenly see no point in trying to rescue him.

I’m numb, disconnected, my feet floating an inch above the pavement. Boris knocks me with his elbow. “We don’t have to. Is just fine if we don’t.” Then, more pointed, deliberate, enunciating every syllable: “You will not have failed if we leave, Potter.”

Up on the banner, the black, lonely, humorous eyes of my finch. They’re familiar to me. They’re standing next to me. I turn and look at them, framed by overlong curls and a furrowed brow.

Boris shifts his weight. “What, why are you looking at me like that?” When I don’t answer, he presses. “I think this is not a so good idea. Let’s go home.” 

I shake my head no. “I want to go in,” I break my silence. He relaxes when I speak; he doesn’t like when I’m quiet for too long, given where my thoughts tend to go while uninterrupted. But I’m strangely okay, since I had expected myself to get to this point on the pavement and start puking, maybe.

He steps up onto the bottom stair, then turns to face me. “Theo,” he says again. 

We never hold hands in public, but he’s holding his out now, clad in black gloves with the fingertips cut off.

“Fucking cold out here,” he says encouragingly.

I hesitate- a reflex- before it dawns on me that there is simply no way I can take this first step without knowing he’s there, without feeling him solid and real against my skin. 

(Last time I was here, I let someone let go of me. But this is not last time.)

I clutch his hand, and we ascend the stairs. I am certain I will not let Boris go until we’re back home, safe in our room and far away from here. As the entrance grows closer, I wonder if I will be a different person by then; when our hands part, having done this, having seen it. 

We stop again, in front of the double doors, letting the stream of tourists file around us in both directions. Maybe it will not be such a bad thing if I am.

His hand squeezes mine. It will not be a bad thing. 

Together, we walk through the doors. Into After.

**Author's Note:**

> PART TWO IS OUT NOW!! READ IT OR SOMETHING
> 
> hmu on tumblr at curlymcclain.tumblr.com and lets yell


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